Free SummarizerMoby-Dick; or, The Whale
Herman Melville · novel, 1851
A one-legged captain drags a whaling crew into a doomed hunt for the white whale that took his leg, and the only survivor lives to tell it clinging to a coffin.
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A one-legged captain drags a whaling crew into a doomed hunt for the white whale that took his leg, and the only survivor lives to tell it clinging to a coffin.
A doctor's decade-old prison letter and a broken wine cask scrawled with the word BLOOD both point to the same guillotine, where a wasted man finally makes his life mean something.
An orphan blacksmith's boy is handed a fortune by a mysterious benefactor and spends it trying to become a gentleman worthy of a woman who was raised to break his heart.
A young matchmaker convinced she understands everyone's heart gets every match wrong, including the one meant for herself.
A sharp-tongued woman and a proud rich man insult each other into love while her mother tries to marry off five daughters to whoever has an income.
A wealthy family throws a garden party on the same day a working man dies just down the hill from their house, and only one daughter thinks that should change anything.
A pawnbroker gets paid four pounds a week for eight weeks to copy an encyclopedia by hand, for reasons that turn out to have nothing to do with him.
A Confederate sympathizer is about to be hanged from a railroad bridge, and the rope breaks. What happens next isn't what it seems.
A man lures his rival into a wine cellar with the promise of a rare vintage, and walls him into the catacombs alive.
A poor couple each sell their one prized possession to buy the other a Christmas gift, and the gifts arrive useless on the same night.
Thoreau moves into a self-built cabin to prove that most of what people spend their lives earning was never necessary in the first place.
Milton set out to "justify the ways of God to men" and produced the most persuasive villain in English literature instead.
A deaf-blind woman's account of the nineteen months of language she had before illness took her sight and hearing, and the single word that gave them back.
A travelling salesman wakes up transformed into a giant insect, and his reaction is to worry about catching his train.
A vengeful stranger devises a scheme to expose the hollow pride of Hadleyburg, a town famous for its incorruptibility, by planting a sack of fake gold and a forged letter that tricks nineteen of its leading citizens into publicly claiming they made a remark they never made. The town-hall ceremony meant to crown one honest benefactor instead reveals all nineteen as liars and would-be thieves before a national audience. The one couple spared public exposure, the Richardses, are nonetheless destroyed by guilt, paranoia, and the weight of a secret dishonesty they cannot escape.
Philip Nolan, a young U.S. Army officer seduced into Aaron Burr's conspiracy, curses the United States at his court-martial and is sentenced to have his wish granted: he spends the next fifty-six years transferred from ship to ship, never permitted to hear his country's name or news. Over those decades he comes to love the country he renounced with a devotion that consumes him, and he dies at sea, surrounded by a hand-drawn American flag and a map of the nation he could never return to.
Narrated by bond salesman Nick Carraway, the novel follows his mysterious neighbor Jay Gatsby, a self-invented millionaire who throws lavish Long Island parties in hopes of reuniting with his lost love, the married Daisy Buchanan. The reunion briefly reignites their affair, but the collision of Gatsby's romantic illusions with the careless cruelty of the wealthy ends in multiple deaths and Gatsby's complete abandonment by those he sought to impress. Nick, disillusioned, returns to the Midwest, leaving behind a world he judges as morally hollow.
Fifteen stories set in early twentieth-century Dublin trace the lives of ordinary Irish men and women from childhood through maturity and public life. Each story turns on a moment of frustrated desire, moral cowardice, or self-deception, building a portrait of a city Joyce saw as gripped by paralysis. The collection closes with 'The Dead,' in which Gabriel Conroy's romantic self-regard is quietly undone when his wife reveals that a young man once loved her enough to die for her.
Over the course of a single June day in post-WWI London, Clarissa Dalloway prepares for an evening party while memories of her youth, her rejected suitor Peter Walsh, and her road not taken surface and recede. Running parallel is the story of Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran whose hallucinations and despair lead him to suicide just as Clarissa's party reaches its height. When news of the young man's death reaches Clarissa mid-party, she feels a strange kinship with him, sensing that his act of self-destruction preserved something she has slowly surrendered to social life.
Agnes Grey, a sheltered clergyman's daughter, takes work as a governess to help her impoverished family and endures two bruising placements: first with the cruel, ungovernable Bloomfield children, then with the vain, indulged Murray daughters at Horton Lodge. Through years of loneliness, professional humiliation, and unrequited longing, she quietly falls in love with the principled curate Edward Weston, and after her father's death and the founding of a small school with her mother, she and Weston meet again by chance on the seashore and marry.
Told entirely through letters, Lady Susan follows the widowed Lady Susan Vernon, a brilliant and utterly unscrupulous schemer, as she maneuvers through polite society seeking a wealthy second husband while attempting to force her timid daughter Frederica into a mercenary marriage. She nearly ensnares the young Reginald De Courcy despite the warnings of his suspicious sister, but is ultimately exposed when Mrs. Mainwaring reveals her ongoing affair to Reginald. The novella ends with Lady Susan marrying the foolish Sir James Martin herself, Frederica finding refuge with the Vernons, and Reginald left to recover and eventually, it is hoped, turn his affections toward Frederica.
Seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland, a clergyman's daughter with no heroic qualities, travels to Bath and then to the Gothic abbey home of the Tilney family, where her imagination, inflamed by Gothic novels, leads her to suspect the respectable General Tilney of murdering his wife. When Henry Tilney gently exposes the absurdity of her suspicions, Catherine is humbled into common sense, and the novel ends with the General's mercenary scheming exposed and Catherine and Henry married.
Joseph Andrews, a virtuous young footman and brother of the famous Pamela, is dismissed by his employer Lady Booby after he resists her sexual advances, and sets out on foot toward home and his beloved Fanny. Along the road he is robbed, beaten, and left for dead, but is rescued and joined by the bumbling, good-hearted Parson Adams, and the two travel together through a series of comic misadventures involving innkeepers, highwaymen, corrupt justices, and hypocritical clergymen. By the end of Volume I, Joseph and Adams have been reunited with Fanny, who had set out to find Joseph after hearing of his misfortune, and the three companions resolve to continue their journey home together.
In four books of blank verse, Milton recounts the forty days Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness, framing the episode as a sustained duel of wits between Satan and the Son of God. Satan deploys successive temptations — bread, wealth, worldly glory, political power, classical learning, and finally a demand for worship atop the Temple pinnacle — each of which Jesus calmly refuses. Satan falls defeated, angels carry Jesus to a flowery valley and feast him, and he returns quietly to his mother's house, having reclaimed what Adam lost through obedience rather than force.
The Frankish emperor Charlemagne is withdrawing from Spain when his treacherous vassal Ganelon arranges with the Saracen king Marsile to ambush the rearguard at Roncevaux. Roland, commanding that rearguard, refuses to sound his horn for help until it is too late, and he and his companions are slaughtered to the last man. Charlemagne returns, destroys the Saracen and their allied admiral Baligant, and brings Ganelon to trial, where he is condemned and torn apart by horses.
When a man is found shot dead in the locked office of an English country house and the owner vanishes, amateur sleuth Antony Gillingham — who happened to arrive moments after the killing — quietly investigates alongside his friend Bill Beverley. The solution turns out to hinge on a secret underground passage, a meticulous impersonation, and a cold act of revenge by the one man everyone trusted.
Nine interlocking stories follow Arsène Lupin, a charming French thief of genius who robs châteaux, escapes prison through elaborate imposture, recovers stolen jewels on his own terms, and outwits every detective sent against him. Lupin operates with theatrical flair, often announcing his crimes in advance, returning stolen goods when it suits him, and publishing self-congratulatory accounts in the press. The collection ends with the arrival of Sherlock Holmes, who deciphers Lupin's methods but finds his quarry already gone, with only a returned stolen watch as a parting joke.
Three hypochondriac friends, J. (the narrator), George, and Harris, plus the fox-terrier Montmorency, take a two-week rowing holiday up the Thames from Kingston to Oxford and back. The book follows their mishaps, digressions, and comic disasters on the river, punctuated by the narrator's rambling reminiscences and mock-philosophical asides. After two days of relentless rain on the return journey, the trio abandons the boat at Pangbourne, sneaks to the railway station, and ends the trip with a celebratory supper in London.
Cyrano de Bergerac, a brilliant Gascon soldier-poet with a famously enormous nose, secretly loves his cousin Roxane but believes his ugliness makes him unworthy of her. He ghostwrites passionate letters and speeches for the handsome but tongue-tied Christian de Neuvillette, allowing Christian to win Roxane's heart while Cyrano suffers in silence. The deception endures through war, Christian's death, and fifteen years of widowhood, until Roxane finally understands the truth only as Cyrano lies dying.
Barry Cumberland, a restless young New York millionaire haunted by visions of a dark-eyed woman in Egyptian dress, joins his father and the mysterious dealer Danbazzar on an illegal excavation in the Valley of the Queens. They open an ancient tomb and apparently awaken Princess Zalithea, a captive of Pharaoh Seti I who has slept in suspended animation for over three thousand years. After Zalithea vanishes from New York, Barry pursues her to Paris, where the entire enterprise is revealed to be an elaborate illusion staged by a master showman.
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